Recent developments in media streaming have favored Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as the transport protocol for many reasons. HTTP protocol stacks are widely deployed on almost every existing platform. Launching a streaming service with HTTP does not require specialized hardware or software but may be done using existing off-the-shelf servers, such as the open source Apache web server. The usage of HTTP also has the benefit of reusing existing Content Distribution Network (CDN) infrastructures. Furthermore, due to the wide use of HTTP, network address translation (NAT) traversal and firewall issues that other protocols, such as Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), may encounter are resolved inherently for HTTP.
Several adaptive HTTP streaming solutions have been developed over the past few years. A prominent solution is one standardized by the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) called Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). DASH is a set of technology standards by which devices operate to enable high-quality streaming of media content over networks such as the Internet. DASH defines the formats for media data delivery, as well as the procedures starting from the syntax and semantics of a manifest file called the Media Presentation Description (MPD).
However, DASH is a client driven, pull based streaming solution that lacks information regarding bottleneck resource constraints, as well as rate-distortion trade-off information for video sessions that are sharing the bottleneck. Thus, DASH cannot effectively coordinate the traffic over the bottleneck and achieve Quality of Experience (QoE) maximization for all video sessions sharing the bottleneck. Furthermore, the HTTP transport is ill-suited for wireless channels, as it interprets packet loss as congestion, and halves the transmitting window which may result in a slow start and/or loss of utilization of the channel. Therefore, DASH may be prevented from achieving the full QoE potentials of the video applications over current networks.